Hi, I have a small time web site for the bar I own in Lanzarote, on this I have a guestbook. Lately I noticed a lot of people adding comments who I didn't know (it's normally people who have been to the bar who leave comments). I then decided to download the DB and check it over and noticed links to dodgy porn sites hidden away. I've changed to the script so it e-mails me rather then automatically adding the comment and to my suprise no one has tried to leave one of these links. So, do these kind of links come from bots or people and if I change it back to a automatic process will the spam return? JP p.s sorry if in the wrong place just wanted some feed back off anyone else who had this problem.
Dirty links tend to be from bots, best thing to do is to have an image verification script and this is likely to hugely decrease spam comments and links. Worked great for me ;-)
I took guest book down, and sneaked it back up a few months later. Back came the spammer. All the porn sites had same whois record. Guestbooks, and forums can be a huge pain due to spammers. I will never have another guestbook and will never use phpbb. Shannon
I've had this problem too.. they just spammed me bigtime. What worked for me was just to enable entry moderation. And approve each entry that was real, and deny all of the spam. Josh
Smyl, phpBB is much better now because members have to enter verification code before signing up, and since most of the spammers use automatic scripts it doen't appear to be a problem anymore. You obviously get the odd idiot who will try and signup and then spam, but it takes them longer because they have to vertify and click a link to have their account verified. JP - if your interested in reciprocating links drop me a PM
Cheers for the info, at the moment I have all comments coming to me first then I will upload them if they are ok, I might stick with that for a while and if it gets to much then I can go another route. JP
Thats what worked for me. Eventually, they learned that their comments wheren't getting on, and it stopped. Took a few months though. Josh
Yes, I do the same on my blog, all comments are moderated and then accepted providing that the comment isnt spam - might take a few hours longer to get the comment on the blog but its better than having casino and porn comments on it!
I don't have a problem with my blog.. I used to have to have moderation on, but now Wordpress plugins do it all for me They take care of all the casino comments and such.. occasionaly there is the comment that makes it through, but I have the temp nofollow plugin, so it adds the nofollow tag to the link, so SEs dont index their site. (Removes it after two weeks (for the valid comments with URLs) I think, plenty of time for me to delete the comment) Josh